Tag Archives: website navigation

Usable Websites Depend on Navigation

Posted on March 27, 2013 by | Leave a comment

According to the latest research from Jakob Neilsen, most users are unable to solve problems with search. Effective websites should redirect their efforts into more supportive user interfaces when possible.

Users are incredibly bad at finding and researching things on the web. In study after study, Neilsen researchers find that most users don’t know how to use search.

Search suggestions are a now a popular way to help people overcome their limited generative abilities by showing a drop-down of fully formed potential queries as soon as users type in a few characters that hint at their needs. Although helpful, users often assume that it lists everything the site carries. Thus, if something isn’t included in the search suggestions, users might never bother to search for it.

Until people begin to grasp the complexities of search and develop skills accordingly, businesses that take such extra steps to help users find what they need will improve customer success — and the bottom line.

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Posted in Communication, Research

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Reaching College-Age Audiences Online

Posted on December 17, 2010 by | Leave a comment

If you target audience is or includes college-age users, new research  Jakob Nielsen has some good insight.

In summary, they found that students are multi-taskers who move through websites rapidly, often missing the item they come to find. They’re enraptured by social media but reserve it for private conversations and thus visit company sites from search engines.

  • Students are comfortable with technology and it doesn’t intimidate them. But, college students avoid website elements that they perceive as “unknown” for fear of wasting time. They pass over areas that appear too difficult or cumbersome to use. If they don’t perceive an immediate payoff for their efforts, they won’t click on a link, fix an error, or read detailed instructions.Students don’t like to learn new user interface styles. They prefer websites that employ well-known interaction patterns.
  • Students often appreciate multimedia, and certainly visit sites like YouTube. But they don’t want to be blasted with motion and audio at all times.
  • Students often judge sites on how they look. But they usually prefer sites that look clean and simple rather than flashy and busy. Students don’t go for fancy visuals and they definitely gravitate toward one very plain user interface: the search engine. Students turn to search at the smallest provocation in terms of difficult navigation.
  • Virtually all students keep one or more tabs permanently opened to social networking services like Facebook. But they associate Facebook and similar sites with private discussions, not with corporate marketing. When students want to learn about a company, university, government agency, or non-profit organization they turn to search engines to find that organization’s official website. They don’t look for the organization’s Facebook page.

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Posted in Communication, Generations, Research

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Alphabetical Sorting Not the Best

Posted on November 2, 2010 by | Leave a comment

When in doubt, I have always presented lists of items in alphabetical order. My thinking was that this is a logical order that everyone understands. Well, usability testing has me rethinking that approach, and it should make you reconsider too.

According to usability expert Jakob Nielsen, ordinal sequences, logical structuring, time lines, or prioritization by importance or frequency are usually better than A–Z listings for presenting options to users.

Most of the time, users don’t know the name of the thing they want, making A–Z listings useless or the items have an inherent logic that dictates a different sort order, which makes A–Z listings directly harmful because they hide that logic.

A-Z does have a limited effective role: If users know the name of the thing they want, they can usually find it in the list pretty quickly.  Example: list of states.

Depending on the nature of your information, usability might be better served by yet other types of structures. And yes, in a few cases, this might even be the alphabet. But typically, when you reach for an A–Z structure, you should give yourself a little extra kick and seek out something better.

Promising to kick myself as I work on site maps for clients…

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Posted in Communication, Research

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